At the state's largest university, professors like Simmons have had to learn to cope with - and teach - hordes of students at once. As the student body has swelled to 25,000, crowded classes have grown more crowded and more frequent.

While educating hundreds of students at a time has its rewards, professors at a recent university forum on large classes said it also can be very frustrating.

``You have to put the control where it's supposed to be - with you,'' entomology professor Timothy Mack urged more than 150 fellow professors when the subject of misbehaving students came up.

Lanny Cross, Tech's vice president for student affairs, and other officials decided to hold a forum after hearing concerns from faculty members about their ability to educate students in large lecture halls that seat up to 700 people.

``We wanted to respond to the frustrations these faculty members were experiencing,'' Cross said. ``We do have a lot of students that are in these large sections.''

The number of large classes even surprised Terry Wildman, director of Tech's 5-year-old Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, which organized the discussion.

According to the registrar's office, professors teach as many as 50 classes each year with at least 300 students, 140 classes of 150 to 300 students and 170 classes of 100-150 students.

``These numbers indicated a need for support far greater than I had anticipated,'' Wildman said.

In big classes, professors said, they had problems holding students' attention and controlling rowdiness, and they resented students who left early or came late or those who didn't pay attention and tried to wheedle out of tests.

``It got so I would dread coming into my office on Monday morning'' after an exam, said Brenda Shirley, a biology professor. ``My voice mail would be filled with dead grandmothers and sicknesses.''